Monday, November 27, 2006

Thanksgiving in the Big Empty

















Thanksgiving morning, not long after getting up, I was feeling, well, melancholy would be the best word I know of for describing the feeling. So I got my camera and set out with the intention of capturing that feeling in an image. I drove up to the top of Mount Muccabull, and found the world to be gloriously beautiful, with the new fallen snow, the puffy clouds hanging off the tops of all the mountain ranges in sight, and the sky a bright clear blue. This wasn't helping at all with my project, so I thought I might come back into town and find the shot I was seeking.

The picture above was taken on the return, from very near the town dump, and gives a nice view of the Little Humboldt Valley. You can just make out a homestead in the lower middle field of winter dried sagebrush. It also provides some much needed scale to the photo.

To make a long story short, I failed in my original mission, but felt much better having spent a couple of hours outdoors taking in the cold air, light, and space.
















I took several dozen shots, and the most interesting one, to me, was this one.

Yield and overcome.

5 comments:

Luo Qi said...

Fantastic Photos. Love it.

MorsaJones said...

i'm not sure why you're so convinced that a photo like the one you've captured here just can't be interesting.. i liked these water shots you got..

MorsaJones said...

and i meant to add. sometimes the most simple things are the most beautiful.

~Bungalow Bill~ said...

Ah, I didn't say they weren't interesting, or beautiful to me; I just didn't capture "melancholy" as I had intended.

Unknown said...

Spoon mountain, eh? Sometimes I hike to the top when biking the loop out along the river. The "homestead" is an abandoned ordnance dump, where mines stored blasting chemicals before the bigger facility between Muccabull Mountain and the sand dunes went in. It did look like someone was squatting in a container there last time I rode through. And if as Melancholy Jacques (pronouned "Jay-quease") said, "all the world's a stage," Spoon Mountain would make a great theater-in-the-round.